Beer #153 - ParrotDog / Forget-Me-Not

BREWERY // ParrotDog are favourite of ours. Their beautiful oatmeal stout, Otis, was one of the first Beer Jerk beers waaay back in April 2015. Their story is pretty short but they have come a long way in just a few years. Matt and Matt were studying in Wellington when they developed a taste for good beer. After a glorious summer of sampling the best beers they could get their hands on they became inspired to pool their cash and start brewing in the dingy basement of their Aro Valley flat. Things moved up a level when they joined forces with a third Matt to contract brew one of their beers in Taranaki. The verdict for this first large scale brew wasn't good. Too bitter- the trio of Matts were recommended to dump it. Fortunately other tasters thought different and this was the birth of their excellent IPA- Bitter Bitch. They quickly scaled up to a very cool brewery in central Wellington. They have recently been in the news again raising crowd funding to create an awesome new brewery and tasting room in Lyall Bay. They also have a mini test brewery there where they are pumping out very limited amounts of the LB series. Grab them wherever you see them.

BEER // Forget-Me-Not is the name of a perennial, brilliant blue Chatham Island herb also known as Kopakopa. More importantly, it's the name of an exceptional beer. A beer so good in fact, it won the hotly contested 2015 West Coast IPA Challenge. The competition is an invitation-only event in Wellington where NZ brewers compete to riff on the style that really defined a new generation of beer in California. It began the craft movement as we know it today - big, punchy, bold hop flavours with lots of bitterness and a malt base that is relatively high abv but also dry. Forget-Me-Not takes a new spin by using various 'new school' hops to make for a beer that's packed with floral aroma, bitter, citrus testiness and stone fruit characteristics. With the current trend for soft NEIPAs with low bitterness, this resinous, bitter IPA is almost retro.